Tools

The team over at Square have released a new open source debugging tool this week which makes use of the WebKit web inspector panel in Chrome to show details of the network requests that your iOS app is making in real time. Only limitation is that your network calls need to be based around the NSURLConnection classes but it's likely that even if you are using a 3rd party library like AFNetworking that it already uses NSURL under the covers.

We just relaunched a new version of our little crowd sourced App Store review times site this week. It still takes data from Twitter and reports the average duration of an App Store review but now it has trend information for both the current month and also across the whole year. If you look at the annual trend for the iOS store you can clearly see the spike in review time recently although it is falling back down again now which is great news. Full disclosure: This is a site run by me but I figured it was interesting enough that I would have linked to it had someone else created it.

Design

I really like the Play by Play series by PeepCode and this week Geoffrey Grosenbach sits down with Neven Mrgan of Panic to design an iOS app. I find it really fascinating to watch and listen to the process that people go through when presented with a problem and this looks like a great episode.

Trey Smith looks with an article on the phases that the App Store has been through so far. Phase 1 was Premium games, Phase 2 was Free to Play games. Trey takes a look at some of the crazy numbers the Free to Play games are doing and speculates on what Phase 3 of the App Store may be.

macOS Development

If you are new to Mac development from an iOS background then this is an interesting Stack Overflow answer by Peter Hosey about a subtle but important difference between the two platforms regarding ownership of objects in nib files. It is also worth checking out the nib section in the Apple "Resource Programming Guide" for more information on how things have changed for iOS since the introduction of ARC.